The battle for net neutrality is heating up, as the Federal Communications Commission finds that the public's opinion seems to be strongly against the agency's plans to allow ISPs to charge online content providers for faster access to its customers.

Detailed in this Politico report, most people taking the time to issue comments to the FCC on its planned net neutrality changes are against it, and against giving ISPs any more power than they already have. Roughly 69,000 people have written to the FCC so far about its proposed open Internet rules, according to Politico.

And it seems like all sides hate this new proposal from Chairman Tom Wheeler. Consumers hate it because they feel that ISPs already have too much power over Internet traffic, while companies think that new rules about regulating ISPs like phone companies is a bad idea. Rights groups hate it because it goes against the core tenets of net neutrality and lawmakers on both sides of the issue of net neutrality are publicly commenting on how much of a bad idea Wheeler's proposal is.

The response has been pretty overwhelming for the FCC. The agency's online system for public comments went down on Monday, thanks in part to comedian John Oliver, who urged viewers of his HBO show to contact the agency. It marked the latest, most high-profile indication yet that Wheeler's net neutrality proposal had struck a nerve in America.

Politico has a number of comments from everyday citizens to the FCC it highlighted collected here.

If you would like the let your voice be heard on this important topic, then check out the ECA's Action Alert page.

Comments

I think that if we want to charge customers for "faster" connection speeds, we need to guarantee some sort of minimum speed. As an example, my cable internet is a 50meg connection - if they want to charge me for something in addition to the rates I already pay to go to certain sites, I BETTER get at least 40megs 95+ percent of the time.

This is a bit difficult. You can't guarantee speed to any specific endpoint on the internet because they also pay for their own hosting, and depending on how heavily trafficked a site becomes they may end up being slower. So when you say that they need to give a minimum speed requirement where is that measuring to?

I'd also like to mention that netflix streaming wont even give 40mbs regardless of if you're the only person utilizing their service. data is only pushed through as fast as it needs to be to meet a certain quality. If there's no more data to push how can you be sending/receiving faster than what actually exists?

I feel like a large part of this discussion is being done over he said/she said that it would be like 'insert dramatic point for either side of the net neutrality debate.' Rather than actual technical specifications on what is going on behind the scenes and how much actual data/throughput is being used or should be available per user/business etc.

Furthermore, the only thing we've actually seen so far that directly infringes on the ideal of 'net neutrality' is Carriers actually blocking protocols/ports. SMTP is almost unanimously blocked by providers today, and Mobile carriers such as verizon have a host of protocols they block (irc being one). This in my opinion is more damaging than the ethical considerations of throttling and it's been going on since mobile data was a thing.